#Sarah Cypher

[gennsoup]

Love is nothing if not a catastrophe, one that makes me second-guess gravity, history, the limits of my own person. Love is, might be, feels like, a kind of fairy tale too--one that can begin only once the story we thought we knew blows apart.

Sarah Cypher, The Skin and Its Girl

[qbdatabase]

The Skin and Its Girl by Sarah Cypher In a Pacific Northwest hospital far from the Rummani family’s ancestral home in Palestine, the heart of a stillborn baby begins to beat and her skin turns a vibrant, permanent cobalt blue. On the same day, the Rummanis’ centuries-old soap factory in Nablus is destroyed in an air strike. View the full summary and rep info on wordpress or check it out for free from the Queer Liberation Library!

[queerbookdirectory]

NEW BOOK SUBMISSION

THE SKIN AND ITS GIRL || SARAH CYPHER

the QBD gave me: The Skin and Its Girl by Sarah Cypher!!

I'm actually currently reading this book right now and I really like it! It's also the first queer Palestinian book I've gotten up on the QBD, which you will be able to find using the brand new Palestinian sorter in the filters!! I can't wait to get more up, I've just been a bit under the weather and haven't had the chance yet!

The Skin and Its Girl is a striking tale of identity told through the eyes of a Palestinian-American as she decides whether she should follow her heart and perpetuate her family's cycle of exile, or whether she shouldn't. As she decides, she comes across her aunt's journal and learns about what it took for her family to get where they are.

I can't wait to finish this book and I hope y'all give it a try too!

SUMMARY

In a Pacific Northwest hospital far from the Rummani family’s ancestral home in Palestine, the heart of a stillborn baby begins to beat and her skin turns vibrantly, permanently cobalt blue. On the same day, the Rummanis’ centuries-old soap factory in Nablus is destroyed in an air strike. The family matriarch and keeper of their lore, Aunt Nuha, believes that the blue girl embodies their sacred history, harkening back to a time when the Rummanis were among the wealthiest soap-makers and their blue soap was a symbol of a legendary love.

Decades later, Betty returns to Aunt Nuha’s gravestone, faced with a difficult decision: Should she stay in the only country she’s ever known, or should she follow her heart and the woman she loves, perpetuating her family’s cycle of exile? Betty finds her answer in partially translated notebooks that reveal her aunt’s complex life and struggle with her own sexuality, which Nuha hid to help the family immigrate to the United States. But, as Betty soon discovers, her aunt hid much more than that.

The Skin and Its Girl is a searing, poetic tale about desire and identity, and a provocative exploration of how we let stories divide, unite, and define us—and wield even the power to restore a broken family. Sarah Cypher is that rare debut novelist who writes with the mastery and flair of a seasoned storyteller. 

CONTENT WARNINGS

suicidal ideation, attempted suicide (off page), depression, miscarriage, racism, homophobia

REPRESENTATION

Palestinian American lesbian mc, Palestinian lesbian mc, Palestinian gay side characters

GOODREADS LINK LINK TO PURCHASE THE BOOK

[lgbtqreads]

Happy Arab American Heritage Month 2023!

It’s Arab American Heritage Month, and as always, we’re celebrating with books starring Arab American protagonists! Please note that this post only includes books that haven’t been included in previous years, so for even more recs, click here! Man O’War by Cory McCarthy The jellyfish commonly known as a Portuguese man o’ war is neither Portuguese, nor a jellyfish, nor a man, nor even a singular…

[wreckitremy]

"They say that every human being on earth carries one molecule of Julius Caeser's dying breath in their lungs. It's like that"

The Skin and Its Girl, Sarah Cypher

[ladespeinada]

“All the old stories talk about the Road of No Return, the Road of Good Fortune, and the Road of this or that, but I’m seeing that a woman is not fully in possession of herself until there is no road at all, and she must make her own way. That is the problem. I was born roadless, heavy and blue and happiest in one place—content to let you tell me how the world is, and to retreat from any further, disappointing discoveries of my own. But love is nothing if not a catastrophe, one that makes me second-guess gravity, history, and the limits of my own person. Love is, might be, feels like, a kind of fairy tale too—one that can begin only once the story we thought we knew blows apart.” 

The Skin and Its Girl · Sarah Cypher

[judgingbooksbycovers]

​The Skin and Its Girl: A Novel

By Sarah Cypher.

Design by Holly Ovenden.

[giosele]

tw: suicide attempts

I picture my mother like this whenever I need to feel more tender toward her: a scrawny girl, bare calves with a fuzz of dark hair, crouched in a skeletal house with the mice and scorpions, astonished by a ghostly chorus. That night outside Houston, she'd scrambled to the top floor, wondering whether the drop to the foundation was enough to crack open her head and let the voices out. A few years later in boarding school, she'd try a whole bottle of Tylenol. And in college on the California coast, she'd wonder, What about a gun? In Portland, she'd imagine the sound of a single shot from that revolver softened by miles of pine forest. None of it would ever stop the phenomenon and its fixations. From that earthy Texas night onward, as nostalgia preoccupies the exile, death played in my mother's thoughts like the promise of homecoming.

The Skin and Its Girl by Sarah Cypher

[battyaboutbooksreviews]

🍉 Queer Palestinian Books 🍉

🇵🇸 The algorithm is going to keep silencing my posts, but they're not going to silence me. I grew up with little to no books that made me feel seen as a queer/bisexual Palestinian Arab American. Today, it's still not easy enough to find those books online, even though we have thousands of lists, posts, and directories to guide us. To make your search a little easier, here are a few queer Palestinian books to add to your TBR. Please help me spread this by reblogging. Consider adding these to your least for Read Palestine Week (click for resources)! 💜

🍉 The Skin and Its Girl by Sarah Cypher 🇵🇸 A Map of Home by Randa Jarrar 🍉 Hazardous Spirits by Anbara Salam 🇵🇸 To All the Yellow Flowers by Raya Tuffaha 🍉 You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat 🇵🇸 The Specimen's Apology by George Abraham 🍉 Birthright by George Abraham 🇵🇸 Nayra and the Djinn by Iasmin Omar Ata 🍉 Where Black Stars Rise by Nadia Shammas and Marie Enger 🇵🇸 The Twenty-Ninth Year by Hala Alyan 🍉 Guapa by Saleem Haddad 🇵🇸 From Whole Cloth: An Asexual Romance by Sonia Sulaiman

🍉 The Philistine by Leila Marshy 🇵🇸 Love Is an Ex-Country by Randa Jarrar 🍉 Shell Houses by Rasha Abdulhadi 🇵🇸 Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique by Sa'ed Atshan 🍉 Belladonna by Anbara Salam 🇵🇸 Confetti Realms by Nadia Shammas, Karnessa, Hackto Oshiro 🍉 Blood Orange by Yaffa As 🇵🇸 The ordeal of being known by Malia Rose 🍉 Decolonial Queering in Palestine by Walaa Alqaisiya 🇵🇸 Are You This? Or Are You This?: A Story of Identity and Worth by Madian Al Jazerah, Ellen Georgiou 🍉 This Arab Is Queer: An Anthology by LGBTQ+ Arab Writers 🇵🇸 My Mama's Magic by Amina Awad

[gennsoup]

When there is no other beginning but the broken middle of things, we find ourselves in a kind of limbo, in empty towers, following branching hallways, whispering to the walls. Searching for a chance to find others, to build sense out of similarity and affiliation.

Sarah Cypher, The Skin and its Girl

[mannekenpressprints]

Art Fair Roundup

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[houseofpurplestars]

Palestine books at the local queer bookshop!

[Image id: a small table with books laid out on it. A small sign reads: BOOKS ABOUT PALESTINE AND/OR BY PALESTINIAN AUTHORS, with a photograph of the Palestinian flag. The books on the table are: "Environmental Warfare in Gaza" by Shourideh C. Molavi, "The Skin and Its Girl" by Sarah Cypher, "The Hundred Years' War on Palestine" by Rashid Khalidi, "queer palestine and the empire of critique" by Sa'ed Atshan, "Salt Houses" by Hala Alyan, "You Exist Too Much" by Zaina Arafat, "Freedom Is A Constant Struggle" by Angela Davis, "My Name is Rachel Corrie", and "Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear" by Mosab Abu Toha. /end id]

I got copies of You Exist Too Much and Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, and the cashier was reading the Hundred Years War. 🇵🇸

[perfectlyripeclementine]

queer novel masterlist: Palestine edition

Found this list via @evereadssapphic on Instagram.

You Exist Too Much, Zaina Arafat

On a hot day in Bethlehem, a 12-year-old Palestinian-American girl is yelled at by a group of men outside the Church of the Nativity. She has exposed her legs in a biblical city, an act they deem forbidden, and their judgement will echo on through her adolescence. When our narrator finally admits to her mother that she is queer, her mother's response only intensifies a sense of shame: "You exist too much," she tells her daughter.

Told in vignettes that flash between the U.S. and the Middle East--from New York to Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine--Zaina Arafat's debut novel traces her protagonist's progress from blushing teen to sought-after DJ and aspiring writer. In Brooklyn, she moves into an apartment with her first serious girlfriend and tries to content herself with their comfortable relationship. But soon her longings, so closely hidden during her teenage years, explode out into reckless romantic encounters and obsessions with other people. Her desire to thwart her own destructive impulses will eventually lead her to The Ledge, an unconventional treatment center that identifies her affliction as "love addiction." In this strange, enclosed society she will start to consider the unnerving similarities between her own internal traumas and divisions and those of the places that have formed her.

Opening up the fantasies and desires of one young woman caught between cultural, religious, and sexual identities, You Exist Too Much is a captivating story charting two of our most intense longings--for love, and a place to call home.

Haifa Fragments, Khulud Khamis

As a designer of jewelry, Maisoon wants an ordinary extraordinary life, which isn't easy for a tradition-defying activist and Palestinian citizen of Israel who refuses to be crushed by the feeling that she is an unwelcome guest in the land of her ancestors. She volunteers for the Machsom Watch, an organization that helps children in the Occupied Territories cross the border to receive medical care. Frustrated by her boyfriend Ziyad and her father, who both want her to get on with life and forget those in the Occupied Territories, she lashes out only to discover her father isn't the man she thought he was. Raised a Christian, in a relationship with a Muslim man and enamored with a Palestinian woman from the Occupied Territories, Maisoon must decide her own path.

A Map Of Home, Randa Jarrar

In this fresh, funny, and fearless debut novel, Randa Jarrar chronicles the coming-of-age of Nidali, one of the most unique and irrepressible narrators in contemporary fiction. Born in 1970s Boston to an Egyptian-Greek mother and a Palestinian father, the rebellious Nidali--whose name is a feminization of the word "struggle"--soon moves to a very different life in Kuwait. There the family leads a mildly eccentric middle-class existence until the Iraqi invasion drives them first to Egypt and then to Texas. This critically acclaimed debut novel is set to capture the hearts of everyone who has ever wondered what their own map of home might look like.

The Skin And Its Girl, Sarah Cypher

In a Pacific Northwest hospital far from the Rummani family's ancestral home in Palestine, the heart of a stillborn baby begins to beat and her skin turns vibrantly, permanently cobalt blue. On the same day, the Rummanis' centuries-old soap factory in Nablus is destroyed in an air strike. The family matriarch and keeper of their lore, Aunt Nuha, believes that the blue girl embodies their sacred history, harkening back to a time when the Rummanis were among the wealthiest soap-makers and their blue soap was a symbol of a legendary love.

Decades later, Betty returns to Aunt Nuha's gravestone, faced with a difficult decision: Should she stay in the only country she's ever known, or should she follow her heart and the woman she loves, perpetuating her family's cycle of exile? Betty finds her answer in partially translated notebooks that reveal her aunt's complex life and struggle with her own sexuality, which Nuha hid to help the family immigrate to the United States. But, as Betty soon discovers, her aunt hid much more than that.The Skin and Its Girl is a searing, poetic tale about desire and identity, and a provocative exploration of how we let stories divide, unite, and define us--and wield even the power to restore a broken family. Sarah Cypher is that rare debut novelist who writes with the mastery and flair of a seasoned storyteller.

The Philistine, Leila Marshy

Nadia Eid doesn't know it yet, but she's about to change her life. It's the end of the ‘80s and she hasn’t seen her Palestinian father since he left Montreal years ago to take a job in Egypt, promising to bring her with him. But now she’s twenty-five and he’s missing in action, so she takes matters into her own hands. Booking a short vacation from her boring job and Québecois boyfriend, she calls her father from the Nile Hilton in downtown Cairo. But nothing goes as planned and, stumbling around, Nadia wanders into an art gallery where she meets Manal, a young Egyptian artist who becomes first her guide and then her lover. 

Through this unexpected relationship, Nadia rediscovers her roots, her language, and her ambitions, as her father demonstrates the unavoidable destiny of becoming a Philistine – the Arabic word for Palestinian. With Manal’s career poised to take off and her father’s secret life revealed, the First Intifada erupts across the border.

The Twenty-Ninth Year, Hala Alyan

For Hala Alyan, twenty-nine is a year of transformation and upheaval, a year in which the past--memories of family members, old friends and past lovers, the heat of another land, another language, a different faith--winds itself around the present.

Hala's ever-shifting, subversive verse sifts together and through different forms of forced displacement and the tolls they take on mind and body. Poems leap from war-torn cities in the Middle East, to an Oklahoma Olive Garden, a Brooklyn brownstone; from alcoholism to recovery; from a single woman to a wife. This collection summons breathtaking chaos, one that seeps into the bones of these odes, the shape of these elegies.

A vivid catalog of heartache, loneliness, love and joy, The Twenty-Ninth Year is an education in looking for home and self in the space between disparate identities.

Between Banat, Mejdulene Bernard Shomali

In Between Banat Mejdulene Bernard Shomali examines homoeroticism and nonnormative sexualities between Arab women in transnational Arab literature, art, and film. Moving from The Thousand and One Nights and the Golden Era of Egyptian cinema to contemporary novels, autobiographical writing, and prints and graphic novels that imagine queer Arab futures, Shomali uses what she calls queer Arab critique to locate queer desire amid heteronormative imperatives. Showing how systems of heteropatriarchy and Arab nationalisms foreclose queer Arab women's futures, she draws on the transliterated term "banat"--the Arabic word for girls--to refer to women, femmes, and nonbinary people who disrupt stereotypical and Orientalist representations of the "Arab woman." By attending to Arab women's narration of desire and identity, queer Arab critique substantiates queer Arab histories while challenging Orientalist and Arab national paradigms that erase queer subjects. In this way, Shomali frames queerness and Arabness as relational and transnational subject formations and contends that prioritizing transnational collectivity over politics of authenticity, respectability, and inclusion can help lead toward queer freedom.

Belladonna, Anbara Salam

Isabella is beautiful, inscrutable, and popular. Her best friend, Bridget, keeps quietly to the fringes of their Connecticut Catholic school, watching everything and everyone, but most especially Isabella.

In 1957, when the girls graduate, they land coveted spots at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Pentila in northern Italy, a prestigious art history school on the grounds of a silent convent. There, free of her claustrophobic home and the town that will always see her and her Egyptian mother as outsiders, Bridget discovers she can reinvent herself as anyone she desires... perhaps even someone Isabella could desire in return.

But as that glittering year goes on, Bridget begins to suspect Isabella is keeping a secret from her, one that will change the course of their lives forever. (I believe this book is by a Palestinian author but not actually set in or about Palestine.)

[thebunnybooknook]

Palestinian Book Of The Day

The Skin and It’s Girl by Sarah Cypher

In a Pacific Northwest hospital far from the Rummani family’s ancestral home in Palestine, the heart of a stillborn baby begins to beat and her skin turns vibrantly, permanently cobalt blue. On the same day, the Rummanis’ centuries-old soap factory in Nablus is destroyed in an air strike. The family matriarch and keeper of their lore, Aunt Nuha, believes that the blue girl embodies their sacred history, harkening back to a time when the Rummanis were among the wealthiest soap-makers and their blue soap was a symbol of a legendary love.

Decades later, Betty returns to Aunt Nuha’s gravestone, faced with a difficult decision: Should she stay in the only country she’s ever known, or should she follow her heart and the woman she loves, perpetuating her family’s cycle of exile? Betty finds her answer in partially translated notebooks that reveal her aunt’s complex life and struggle with her own sexuality, which Nuha hid to help the family immigrate to the United States. But, as Betty soon discovers, her aunt hid much more than that.

The Skin and Its Girl is a searing, poetic tale about desire and identity, and a provocative exploration of how we let stories divide, unite, and define us—and wield even the power to restore a broken family. Sarah Cypher is that rare debut novelist who writes with the mastery and flair of a seasoned storyteller.

Be sure not to buy from Amazon or Audible to aboid supporting the genocide instead look for secondhand on sites like ebay! And if you can buy directly from the author!

and before anyone comes at me for my tags: this account is the official book club for the coquette subculture and I would be doing a disservice to not only show solidarity with the Palestinians who likely exist within my subculture but also by not using my platform to spread information to those getting misinformation and also those who want to help but do not know how.

[lesbianmarrow]

32 & 36 📖🪱

favorite author(s):

there aren’t a lot of prose authors where ive read several books of theirs (except books from my childhood) but ive really liked what ive read by rachel lyon, sarah cypher, and liz kerin

all time favorite character(s):

ahaha such a goofy answer but percy and annabeth from percy jackson really are my all time sweeties. but for a more grown-up answer….well i like jane eyre from the book jane eyre. and i like bigwig from watership down <3